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Customers aren’t just inundated with marketing messages, they’re inundated with the same messages. The result is people are learning to ignore what they’ve seen before. In this talk you’ll get a framework for writing copy that breaks through that noise, sounds different from competitors and, speaks to your customers’ desires while selling the value of what you do.

What feature or benefit should you put first, what unanswered question do they have that’s stopping them buy?

It’s not enough to know this, you have to write your copy with your customer in mind every step of the way.

What conversation do you have with someone who is evaluation buying options. And how can you get someone’s attention when they don’t even realise they need what you have because they don’t realise they have a problem that needs solving. Without including your customer’s perspective when you not only write but also do research for your copy, creates what I call cheating copy.

Same opening as NIO.

But my copy wouldn’t cheat on me, would it? That’s the question to ask.

All sounded the same. Even if these things are true and what we have is powerful, there’s a danger when any words or phrases become over-used in marketing.

Region in the brain that deals with language comprehension but a specific trait is that it learns to skip over words or phrases that seem predictable. They no longer have an impact as to the first time we saw them

We know we have to cut through the clutter. We know people are inundated with marketing messages.

Not just that everyone else is using these, but they’re not the most persuasive narrative.

I can’t visualise what that looks like in my life.

Not doing anything special here, but if this copy is next to copy that says what everyone else says, it stands out.

There’s nothing wrong with these as qualities. The difficulty is when everyone in your industry is describing themselves as having the same qualities. Then you become a commodity.

And it’s not just within your industry that you have to be careful.

And it’s

Why does it happen? We don’t set out to write copy that sounds like our competitors. But it still happens. And it’s because there’s a tendency to write from a product rather than customer perspective and this creates what I call umbrella terms.

Recently at a workshop with a company that has a very complex product within the financial industry. This company generates more than $10bn in revenue, and when describing their offer, they were relying on the word ‘tools’ to communicate what they could do for customers. It’s a challenge to deconstruct these terms. It takes more work, but in a sea of similarity, the extra effort is worth it.

Now it’s not just that everyone else is using these words, there is also the problem of ambiguity.

Before you report me. I am not, any of the scary clowns we’re seeing in the news.

Qualify why you’re making that promise.

Company called next after that do research to help non-profits optimise their donation process. They have an extensive library of A/B tests that they’ve done. Quick example of the impact of stripping away the ambiguity.

https://www.nextafter.com/research/2016/03/mission-statement-vs-value-proposition What you do and HOW you do it. Give attribution to Next After library.

Jewish Voice Ministries. Writing from an internal perspective. If you were familiar with the organisation, thei made sense. But what if you weren’t ? They decided to simplify the message of what they did and how they did it.

On the right is internal styles of copywriting, because we have knowledge our customers don’t which lets us add context to those descriptions. On the left is external copywriting – copy that makes sense even if someone isn’t familiar with our business.

You want a combination of the two. You want to be aspirational and make promises, but you want to also back them up.

You want to ask yourself when you’re looking at your copy whether there’s a disconnect, a disparity about what you know about your product. And what they think they know about your product.

On one of the other adverts, the promise wasn’t just growing pets, it was instant pets. I was so excited and desperate to own sea monkeys. But my parents wouldn’t let me. Now as a child I had an image of what sea monkeys were.

It was this image. And I didn’t read the small print.

But even if I had, this wouldn’t put me off. Artemia sounds exotic.

Artemia…. This is what I would have expected from the advertising.

Not this.

And if I’d had a jar full of these as a kid I would have been completely freaked out. Turns out artemia. Or sea monkeys are actually brine shrimp.

Obviously you’re not selling brine shrimp to gullible kids, but you do need to be aware of possible areas of disconnect.

Here is our busy freelancer looking for time-tracking software.

She’s on the go, she’s got to stop every fifteen minute to pose for a stock photo.

When writing your copy, take time to talk to customers. Find out how they interpret your promises.

Looking at combining them. How could we do this in our copy?

Nothing wrong with making these promises as long as you back them up.

So – ask yourself if your copy is cheating on you with a competitor, and then are you using any umbrella terms that may not communicate the true value of what you have to offer.

Problem of not having the customer perspective.

So 1, don’t bury a key feature of your product, but make sure it appeals to your customer.

And 2, make sure that you’re putting everything into selling that key feature or features.

Nothing wrong with it. But I feel like there could be a promise more tailored to the customer.

So I go in search of more specific information and I find it much further down the page. Why bury this?

Now the key feature they’ve chosen to highlight to appeal to their customers is the fact that they’re highly responsive. And to a business owner, that’s definitely important. There’s just one problem.

Our cynical business owner doesn’t believe you. Again because we’ve got that ambiguity. What does highliy responsive mean?

So I rewrote it. Now as a business owner I can visualise what this means. I can picture it in my life.

No.

Problem was, my client’s software was truly innovative. It could create faster reports and apply insights without the use of an army of analysts.

So when asked this, it didn’t really trigger any pain. Their clients were doing just as well as their competitors. It just seemed to be one of those things rather than a problem that could eb solved.

So I asked him what the symptoms were and we revisited the copy.

You want to highlight things that customers recognise and they should be vivid enough that the elimination of those symptoms would be worthwhile.

Making reporting faster and easier – not a vivid enough symptom. Getting rid of hundreds of pages of reports, reducing the need for as many analysts. Much more evocative.

They’re interruptors and starters to a conversation.

Another way to put your customer’s perspective into your copy is to survey them. But this comes with a warning.

You don’t’ want to ask them about the solution they need. You don’t want to say would you like to see x feature, or would you pay more if we included this services.

You don’t want to ask them about the solution they’re looking for or how they would solve a problem and relate that to your product because hey are not the experts in solving the problem. You are.

But surveys aren’t useless. Come back to Paul McCartney. We can’t assume we know what customers want.

Broad topics so you’re not just reading from a spec sheet.

You copy should also vividly communicate a transformation.

Quick story. I recently bought dad a small knife as a gift. And I got put on company’s mailing list. Now the site is called preppers. I didn’t know what that meant. Then I started to get their newsletters and realised that a prepper is basically someone who is preparing to survive the imminent apocalypse.

And I loved what they were sending me. Flash sales on crossbows, the panther crossbow, the legend compound crossbow. Water purification tablets. Funny. But I didn’t really think I needed any of these things. I have no idea why I would need a crossbow. But then, I was browsing online, and saw this advert pop-up. Not from this particular shop.

Oooooh. Now I had never even thought of buying a torch. I don’t really have use for one. But what about a torch that could blind a bear.

I want to make it clear I don’t want to blind a bear.

But the copy certainly woke up my broca’s region. I had not seen anything like this before, depsite getting daily emails from preppers.

What the copy is doing is using an anchor.

Aligning the product with something that shows its strength. In this case, a gun. But it could be anything that aligns your product with speed, or ease-of-use. Anchors are very influential.

Then it’s moving into visual copy to help customers contextualise how this product might fit into their life.

Another quick example of anchor and visual copy that I just whizzed up to illustrate. This is for a company called nutmeg. It’s an online investment management company. It’s a service that is becoming more popular with people who don’t want to deal with a fund manager, they don’t want to be blitzed by jargon. And they say that they offer no-nonsense investing. How could we use an example of anchor and visual copy?

Examples from above.

This is just a quick example but it shows you that illustration of aligning with a strength of the product, and then helping customers visualise how the product fits into their life.

Finally, a quick case-study to illustrate how I used some of these techniques for fixing a client’s copy.

26.
Great! Want to
join me at the
clown
convention?!
Oh… I’m not
THAT
passionate
@Harrisonamy

27.
Solving umbrella terms - qualify
“We are currently going through our copy to eliminate all vague promises and
replacing them with more specific ones.
And the update. We asked for your views on the A/B-test we were running on our
homepage. The variation produced an uplift on signups of around **% (also a
**% drop in bounce rate).
It seems the more specific above-the-fold copy is, the more visitors are
drawn in to read more”
Reino Meriläinen
Isolta.com

40.
10-minute set-up, new features every month, the
ability to handle complex billing cycles and
integration with Google apps.
[Product] is the powerful time-tracking software
that’s also easy-to-use.
@Harrisonamy

50.
Struggling to integrate data
across different accounts,
regions or countries?
@Harrisonamy

51.
Does it take weeks to get detailed reports
from your worldwide retailers?
Are you unable to compare international
operations without further help from analysts?
Are your analytics reports 3-400 pages long?

52.
Weave into your copy:
1. Here’s what you may have recognised (symptoms)
2. This is what’s causing them (problem)
3. This is what you need (cure)
4. This is what is possible with the cure (results / contrast)
@Harrisonamy

53.
Symptoms Problem Cure Contrast
Taking weeks to
get detailed
reports from
worldwide retail
operations
Most software
reports need
analysts to make
sense of the data
and generate
insights.
Automated
process
Get a global
perspective of
operations quickly.
Use that data to make
decisions faster, act
upon opportunities
while competitors are
still aggregating data.
@Harrisonamy

58.
Challenges
“Billing clients is a nightmare but I haven’t got
time to learn a new system”
“We have so many pricing structures I don’t know
how we’d bring it together without spending a
lot.”
@Harrisonamy

59.
Questions
“Can I really find software that isn’t loaded with
things I’ll never use?”
“How many of my tasks can I truly automate?
@Harrisonamy

76.
Cheating copy? Umbrella terms
What words and phrases show up on competitor sites? Proof Promise
Symptoms Burying value?
1. Here’s what you may have recognised (symptoms)
2. This is what’s causing them (problem)
3. This is what you need (cure)
4. This is what’s possible with the cure (results / contrast)
Survey results
● Challenges
● Questions
Which features help
What emotions do customers feel by using your product? What can they do after? (Blind bears?)
Emotions What will make them feel this way? Transformation